Gilbert Newton Lewis

To inquire into the origin of life is like seeking the origin of electrical machinery or the origin of music. Every increase in complexity of arrangement, of form, of substance, leads to new and often incalculable properties.

In the snobbery of science, each branch attempts to rise in the social scale by imitating the methods of the next higher science and by ignoring the methods and phenomena of the sciences beneath.

Sometimes I think that our laboratories are but little earthworks which men build about themselves, and whose puny tops too often conceal from view the Olympian heights; that we who work in these laboratories are but skilled artisans compared with the man who is able to observe and to draw accurate deductions from the world about him.